After three practice albums that built up a huge fanbase in their native Australia, but didn’t do jack shit here, Midnight Oil had a minor breakthrough on MTV and a major breakthrough on college radio with their fourth album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, which combined lead singer Peter Garrett’s walked-it-like-he-talked-it politics with his band’s unique brand of beat-heavy post-punk.

And for me, no song resonated more on that record than the nuclear paranoia of “Read About It.”

As I’ve written before, the early 1980s was rife with songs worrying about when the bombs were going to drop, something I’m so glad we don’t have to worry about — ah, I can’t do that again: yesterday I read an article in Vox about what might happen if we went to war with North Korea, and it was fucking terrifying.

So a song like “Read About It” is relevant once again, where after a stop-and-start riff gives way to a river of guitars, Garrett sings:

The rich get richer
The poor get the picture
The bombs never hit you
When you’re down so low

One of those songs that’s continually shape-shifting while maintaining its original essence, “Read About It” piles on jangly guitar, cowbells, acapella, handclaps(!) and modulations, in a desperately transparent attempt to keep its message from depressing the fuck out of everyone with his existential problems.

Nothing ever happens
Nothing really matters
No one ever tells me what am I to know
So what am I to know

It even kind of works, in the way that getting run over by a tank also distracts you from your normal existential problems. Near the end, Garrett screams out “ah-ahhhh” over and over again while relentless drummer Rob Hirst powers through big drum rolls, and “Read About It” cycles back to its stop and start riff and crashes into it end.

BTW, the live version below is worth it just for Garrett’s manic dancing during the instrumental section.

“Read About It”

“Read About It” performed live in 1985

Official music video for “Read About It” (muddy sound)

Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.

This will be the only song from Mick Jagger’s solo career that I will be writing about.

And in fact, there might be some confusion as to whether or not “Memo From Turner” is truly a Mick solo song. Not only was it co-written by Keith Richards, the Stones themselves — or some semblance thereof — recorded a version of it in 1968 that ended up on Metamorphosis some years later.

But that version is a run-through, a trifle, when compared to the version that Mick put out as what stood as his only solo single until he actually thought he could sustain a career without the riffs of Keith Richards upon which to stack his vocal dexterity.

Luckily, not. And while 30 years of not being the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band should have taken its toll upon the Rolling Stones, it turns out that they’re like The Simpsons: you can’t kill them, but you can ignore whatever it is they’re doing now, because they were so great for so long it doesn’t even matter.

In any event, during the mid-point of that period where they Could Do No Wrong (I mean, except for Altamont, of course), Mick Jagger filmed a Nicolas Roeg movie called Performance, where he played a rock star called Turner, meaning that “Memo From Turner” was written to order for that character, so it’s Mick Jagger even more in character than normal.

So his vocal is near-manic, taking the piss out of the “gentlemen” — who are, of course, no such thing — he’s addressing with a slur and a tease.

Come now, gentleman
Your love is all I crave
You’ll still be in the circus
When I’m laughing, laughing in my graaaaaave

Also near-manic: Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, which spends the entire song dancing like Jagger over Gene Parsons nervous, jumpy beat, which is so skittery it nearly slides right off of the record.

If I was being honest: “Memo From Turner” isn’t anywhere as great as the songs from Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers it would have had to compete with had they decided to put it on one of those records.

But, of course, they didn’t — because it was during that period where the Rolling Stones Could Do No Wrong — and I do love “Memo From Turner” enough to write about it, even if it’s just an excuse to tell you how fucking excited I’m going to be to write about the Stones proper in 2020 or so if we ever get there.

“Memo From Turner”

“Memo From Turner” in Performance

Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.

So it’s Christmas shopping season 1983. Thriller has been out for little over a year, and spent much of that year as the #1 selling album in the country, and so, figuring that it would probably be an easy Christmas present, as Jay and I walked into Tower Records, it seemed like that entire shelf that you’d see as you’d walk into the store was overflowing with nothing but copies of Thriller. Thriller everywhere. Thriller. Thriller. Thriller.

So I walk over to the stack — maybe it went to the ceiling — grabbed a copy, shoved it at Jay and said: “Hey have you heard of this? Is it any good?”

Unless, of course, he made that joke to me. It was 35 years ago. The point, of course, was that, in 1983, Thriller was totally and utterly inescapable.

All things considered, Thriller — along with perhaps the M*A*S*H finale, which happened the same week it first topped the charts — was the absolute and utter peak of the monoculture, and the crossover success of “Beat It” had a huge part in that, as it ran over the divisions between “black music” and “white music” with the efficiency of a bullet train.

And that’s despite having two of the guys from Toto provide the drums and guitar!

But that guitar is playing a super cool riff, though, marching inexorably against both the real and fake drums, and underpinning the call-and-response chorus with equal parts flair and precision, and honestly, “Beat It” would have been remembered as a classic without Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, the crossover elephant in any conversation about it.

As we will get to at some point in say, 2021, I loved Van Halen, as their debut album came out in my sophomore year in high school — and therefore that love was mandated by law — and even though I discovered punk rock almost immediately afterwards, they were still very much a staple of my musical diet.

That said, when Eddie got the call to come in toss a tornado into the middle of “Beat It,” they’d just made what was easily their weakest album to that point, Diver Down, so it’s possible he was looking for some outside inspiration when Quincy Jones called him.

So in the most “why the fuck not?” moment in his career, he came down, messed around with the song structure and recorded a quintessential Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, which sounded that much more amazing for being unexpected. I mean, unexpected musically: I’m pretty sure that anybody paying attention to popular music already knew that Michael Jackson had a song with an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, but on the record it sounds like Eddie walked in, plugged in, played a blazing solo, unplugged and walked out, having helped change everything.

It’s so awesome it even makes up for Sammy Hagar.

In case you’ve never seen it, here’s the official music video for “Beat It”

Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.

So it’s Christmas shopping season 1983. Thriller has been out for little over a year, and spent much of that year as the #1 selling album in the country, and so, figuring that it would probably be an easy Christmas present, as Jay and I walked into Tower Records, it seemed like that entire shelf that you’d see as you’d walk into the store was overflowing with nothing but copies of Thriller. Thriller everywhere. Thriller. Thriller. Thriller.

So I walk over to the stack — maybe it went to the ceiling — grabbed a copy, shoved it at Jay and said: “Hey have you heard of this? Is it any good?”

Unless, of course, he made that joke to me. It was 35 years ago. The point, of course, was that, in 1983, Thriller was totally and utterly inescapable.

All things considered, Thriller — along with perhaps the M*A*S*H finale, which happened the same week it first topped the charts — was the absolute and utter peak of the monoculture, and the crossover success of “Beat It” had a huge part in that, as it ran over the divisions between “black music” and “white music” with the efficiency of a bullet train.

And that’s despite having two of the guys from Toto provide the drums and guitar!

But that guitar is playing a super cool riff, though, marching inexorably against both the real and fake drums, and underpinning the call-and-response chorus with equal parts flair and precision, and honestly, “Beat It” would have been remembered as a classic without Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, the crossover elephant in any conversation about it.

As we will get to at some point in say, 2021, I loved Van Halen, as their debut album came out in my sophomore year in high school — and therefore that love was mandated by law — and even though I discovered punk rock almost immediately afterwards, they were still very much a staple of my musical diet.

That said, when Eddie got the call to come in toss a tornado into the middle of “Beat It,” they’d just made what was easily their weakest album to that point, Diver Down, so it’s possible he was looking for some outside inspiration when Quincy Jones called him.

So in the most “why the fuck not?” moment in his career, he came down, messed around with the song structure and recorded a quintessential Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, which sounded that much more amazing for being unexpected. I mean, unexpected musically: I’m pretty sure that anybody paying attention to popular music already knew that Michael Jackson had a song with an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, but on the record it sounds like Eddie walked in, plugged in, played a blazing solo, unplugged and walked out, having helped change everything.

It’s so awesome it even makes up for Sammy Hagar.

In case you’ve never seen it, here’s the official music video for “Beat It”

Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.

In 1979, after taking some time off from his waning post-Jackson Five solo career, Michael Jackson got away from the Motown machine, hired Quincy Jones as his producer, and completely reinvented himself with a revolutionary blend of disco, pop and funk.

It was, of course, a complete failure, and like what happened with renowned session man Jimmy Page after he abandoned The Yardbirds to form his own band, Jackson was never heard from again.

Oh wait. That’s not right: Off The Wall was his biggest selling record up to that point, and it spawned a shitload of massive singles — including lead track “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” which was his second #1 hit single (after his 1972 movie tie-in maudlin friendship song to a killer rat, “Ben,”) (the 1970s, right?) — and the official kickoff to his adulthood.

Not that I paid any attention to any of this at the time: it’s possible that some DJ spun “Don’t Stop Until You Get Enough” at a school dance or some shit like that, but in 1979, I was spinning theories as to why it was OK to like The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Ramones and Neil Young all at the same time, and not paying attention to what Michael Jackson was doing, at the exact last moment where it was possible to not pay attention to what Michael Jackson was doing.

So I didn’t purposely hear Off The Wall until it was reissued in the mid-80s on the heels of Thriller and we got a promo copy at KFSR, and I figured “what the fuck?.” And while I wasn’t blown away — disco, pop and funk not being at the forefront of what I was listening to in the mid-1980s — it’s impossible not to be impressed by Quincy Jones’ spotless production, somehow isolating every single instrument while blending everything together into a seamless whole.

And while then as now, I preferred Prince (and remember I prefer Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones to the Beatles), all of these years later, I can absolutely hear what’s so great about “Don’t Stop Until You Get Enough.”

Official Video for “Don’t Stop til You Get Enough”

Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.